


The Telltale Heart

by orphan_account



Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: Everything is fluff and nothing hurts, F/M, but also I love edith so I hope you all like gushing, it hurts me not to write more lucille in this, thomas is a nerd with no chill anyway let's be real about it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-28
Updated: 2015-10-28
Packaged: 2018-04-28 13:44:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5092943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He doesn't know when it happened, or how.</p>
<p>What he does know is that it very certainly happened without his permission.</p>
<p>(( Fill for a prompt on tumblr where someone asked about "at what point did Thomas fall in love with Edith" ))</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Telltale Heart

He tells himself he’s practicing.

He’s practicing, because the moment he walked into the office, his attention has been trained on the woman in the golden dress, sitting studiously at her typewriter. He’s practicing, because it would be against his moral code to flirt with someone, anyone, who isn’t a potential candidiate for the house. And surely a secretary - no matter how well dressed or how pretty - shouldn’t be well set off enough to have a large entitlement tucked somewhere in the skirts of her dress. 

Scratch that last part. Not thinking about what’s beneath her skirts, he’s… He’s not thinking about that. That would be very wrong of him. He can feel the chilling effect of Lucille’s quiet displeasure with him just at the errant thought, and mentally checks himself. He tries to focus his mind on something else while she reads his card - anything will do, really, but he’s a voracious reader and the manuscript she’s apparently typing from allows him to busy himself from other thoughts about her dress or whatever she might have beneath it.

“Here to speak to the man, himself.” She says, and when he looks up, her cherubic smile has faded into a flat expression of displeasure, cross with his presence for reasons he can’t discern.

Thomas tries charm, jokes, self deprecation. But that infernal smudge of disapproval still betrays itself as she walks past him, not even giving him a second glance. 

“This manuscript, who wrote it?” He asks, as a last ditch attempt. It’s an old wound but it aches, being treated like he isn’t there. At last, it catches her attention.

“Why?” She asks him, and the scorn relieves itself with caution. He knows that look, the trepidation of judgement. It’s a look he has to hide every time he goes into a boardroom, knowing the loosing battle he’s about to fight. It’s her product, he assumes, her child, her hope; he’d know a creator’s curiosity anywhere.

“Well, it’s… Rather good, don’t you think?” 

The knot that he hadn’t realized had been winding in his chest at her dismissal finally releases, tension flowing from the back of his neck, down through his fingertips. His veins tingle when she smiles at him, and he imagines there’s something in that look that can warm even a frozen heart.

It’s a pleasant way to pass time, under the glow of her conversation, and by the time she’s walking away and he’s walking to another meeting he knows is likely to end only in frustration and ridicule, Thomas Sharpe almost feels hopeful. The feeling was long ago supposed to have died within him, and yet he feels the spark deep in his gut, an ember smouldering, making his flowery words catch fire and turn to incense as he tries to cast the wolves of the board under his spell. It nearly works.

And then he notices that she is there.

At first she seems like a figment, and he draws in breath. It’s just a moment of hesitation, but it breaks the fluid incantation of his long enough for Mr. Cushing to catch sight of her, too. He doesn’t know if it’s her presence or merely the pause for thought that makes him turn so hard on him, but he does.

He circles Thomas as he approaches, winding closer, and Thomas hates it. He’s a big man, like Thomas’s own father was, all broad shoulders and barrel chest and massive hands. The approach gives him enough time to draw nervous, to let him run like his instincts tell him. But Thomas stands his ground. He stands his ground, even if his eyes don’t quite meet Mr. Cushing’s when he takes Thomas’s hands in his own.

The softest hands he’s ever touched, he calls them, and the inventor hears the derision in his voice, so familiar that it takes strength not to let tears of hurt prickle up. He feels a violent anger born from years of terror, years of self doubt, years of pain at not being good enough, at not being a man enough for his own father to appreciate. The words that come out next are a lava flow, heated to sear the skin off of his body if they could. 

He wants that man to die from the venom in him.

He tells Lucille, later. He tells her, his body shaking with the memory, his voice strained from trying to withhold the volume of it. How soft would that pompous fool consider his hand, he asks her, if they had been wrapped around his throat? If he had killed him then and there?

“That’s not what we came for. You always forget that those meetings of yours are just a pretense.” Lucille reminds him, stroking his dark curls with a steady hand. She’s looking to the middle of the hotel wall, thoughtful. “But we might arrange it, anyway.”

Thomas looks up at her.

“What?” He asks. She smiles, her white teeth a blade of bone.

“Didn’t you know?” She asks. “I hear he has a daughter.”

Slowly, Thomas matches his sister’s smile.

-

He has to admit, he perhaps didn’t think things entirely through when he agreed to call on Mr. Cushing’s daughter.

They hadn’t really looked up what she looked like - blonde hair, he was told, and a young lady of twenty four, but no more than that. Well, that was a lie, the information he’d been able to gather from the young society lady he’d flirted with in London - what was her name? Endive? Undine? He could scarcely be faulted for not knowing, her prattling on and overt flirtations were hard to even pretend to tolerate, much less listen with rapt attention to - also included that her mother was dead and that she believed in ghosts, along with the rather pointed comment about her being a bookish spinster in a girl’s body.

Not for all his life would he have bet on it being the writer from Cushing’s office.

If he hadn’t brought her to the ball, Lucille would have been cross with him. But as he traveled with her, she talked to him about all sorts of things, about the book she was writing, about ghosts, about symbols. His sister had never really been very interested in books, honestly. Though learned as she could be, she had always thought of tales as tiresome things, and the more she matured the more they became to her symbols of their father, of worlds away from the one she’d worked so hard to construct for herself. Thomas had neither the money to procure more books nor the mobility to discuss any of his ideas with other people at length, and sitting across from Edith, who gives such eloquent lectures on her own passion, makes him somewhat entranced.

She speaks about novels as living, breathing things. She talks with a passion, her cheeks flushed and her molasses coloured eyes sparkling in the darkness. And she asks him what he thinks.

Edith asks him what he thinks, like it matters. She asks him what she thinks, like she really wants to know. And when he tells her, she leans close to him to listen, watches him as raptly as he’d been watching her, and he feels that curious warmth inside of his body again as they break into the McMichaels’s parlour.

And that warmth blooms when she watches him as they dance. Thomas has danced with so many women since becoming a man, since growing into a fashionable form and fashionable manners and a fashionable charm. Never once has he felt the rest of the room melt away from himself and his partner, but it happens now, here, with Edith. 

All the universe becomes the two of them and the candle between their palms, and the thud of his heart that strikes love, love, love again and again in a dangerous way, in a way he tries to convince himself later is false.

-

At some point, he expects her to stop asking what he thinks. 

She does not.

Edith likes talking to him, he realizes, and not just for feedback on her book. She talks to him about his machine, about his interest in building things, if he’s seen the clock they have in the center of town and does he know how to make things like that? And when he answers yes, she asks him about it, and sits there and listens to him explain about catch release hands and coils as if timepieces are the most fascinating thing she can imagine.

He’s convinced that it would affect him so much if she’d stop being so sincere about it. But she’s earnest at every turn, a bright thing, so genuinely curious about the whole of the world he lives in that he can’t help but to be flattered by it as much as any woman in his life has been flattered by him. Only her queries and answers and interest aren’t sugar to tamp down the taste of poison like his have always been.

Even Enola only asked about what parts of him were broken, like she was keeping score. She never asked him about anything other than his sore spots, his darkness, but Edith… Edith draws a light from him that he hadn’t quite realized existed.

But that’s what she is, really, a blazing fire in the dead of winter, a sparkling northern star to guide his spirit through the darkness. 

It’s almost a pity to break her heart when Lucille breaks her father’s head.

-

The strangest thing Thomas has ever experienced is the earnestness of Edith’s mourning.

It’s a feeling he can’t quite connect to, honestly. When their father died, when their mother died, he and Lucille felt nothing. Well, Lucille probably felt some degree of triumph, and Thomas had felt some degree of relief, but other than that, it had all been a numb experience between them. Something done, something buried with the bodies.

Her father was a brute of a man, anyway. Both he and Lucille had felt that when Cushing had been talking to them, talking down to them like they were inept children in need of a good thrashing for their actions. He was a callous man, a cruel man, a cold man, and Thomas can’t for the life of him understand why it affects Edith so deeply when he’s dead. It ought to be a burden lifted from her delicate shoulders.

But instead, she rests a heavy head against his breast with weary, tear swollen eyes. Instead, she curls up into his arms and lets Thomas stroke her hair, her back. 

That’s another strange thing, that feeling. Pamela was old enough to try to mother him, and it wasn’t as though Margaret hadn’t tried. Neither of them had relied on him, had ever given him the tenderest parts of their heart. Even Enola had hidden her tears, left him with only her anger or despondency when she was upset. Edith, he thinks, trusts him. Trusts him to love her and to care for her, and asks nothing more than that, nothing less than that. Just to be vulnerable before him.

Strangest of all, Thomas is afraid he might be coming enjoy it.

-

Edith is so many firsts for Thomas that he can’t bear it. 

She is the first woman to enter Allerdale without looking at it like it’s a failure, without wrinkling her nose and commenting on the work that needs doing. She is the first woman to not look back over her shoulder at him and give him the infuriating smile that tells him he’s a disappointment, but that she’ll forgive him for it.

She is the first woman who bothers to try and get on with Lucille even half well, and the first woman who takes an inventory of his library with careful eyes, then sits down with him in the evenings and asks him what his favourite books are, and has he read any more from the same author, and what did he think? She is the first who thinks about the fact that he thinks, who isn’t simpering over his emotional attachment to them every moment of the day, trying to steal kisses or caresses when he doesn’t want them.

Edith is the first to take his breath away when he comes in from picking up the post, and she does it just by walking down the staircase. But when she descends, she’s like some heretofore unknown goddess. She’s Oestara of spring, she’s Artemis of the moon. She’s Aphrodite, she’s Persephone, all bounty and beauty and glittering golden light as she walks towards you, beaming, and it takes him a few moment to blink the stars from his eyes and come back to reality.

She is the first woman to see his workshop.

Even Lucille doesn’t visit him there. She left the nursery, she said, and was never going back, making it the one area that is really his, alone. He doesn’t expect the disturbance of her light tread, and yet, can’t help but smile when he sees her. There’s such a genuine look of admiration in her face as she looks about her, and immediately she assumes he’s the one who created all the wonderments about the two of them.

She’s the first person to wait for his demonstrations, and the look of amusement and appreciation as she watches his little automaton play its tricks. The light catches her, or she catches the light, and he feels that pulse beat aggressively in his chest with love, love, love.

This time, he does not argue with it.


End file.
